of the Germans left the Schlieffen Plan in ruins. A quick victory in the west no
longer seemed possible. In the east, Russian forces had already invaded Germany.
Germany was going to have to fight a long war on two fronts. Realizing this, the
German high command sent thousands of troops from France to aid its forces in
the east. Meanwhile, the war on the Western Front settled into a stalemate.War in the TrenchesBy early 1915, opposing armies on the Western Front had
dug miles of parallel trenches to protect themselves from enemy fire. This set the
stage for what became known as trench warfare. In this type of warfare, soldiers
fought each other from trenches. And armies traded huge losses of human life for
pitifully small land gains.
Life in the trenches was pure misery. “The men slept in mud, washed in mud,
ate mud, and dreamed mud,” wrote one soldier. The trenches swarmed with rats.
Fresh food was nonexistent. Sleep was nearly impossible.
The space between the opposing trenches won the grim name “no man’s land.”
When the officers ordered an attack, their men went over the top of their trenches
into this bombed-out landscape. There, they usually met murderous rounds of
machine-gun fire. Staying put, however, did not ensure one’s safety. Artillery fire
brought death right into the trenches. “Shells of all calibers kept raining on our sec-
tor,” wrote one French soldier. “The trenches disappeared, filled with earth... the
air was unbreathable. Our blinded, wounded, crawling, and shouting soldiers kept
falling on top of us and died splashing us with blood. It was living hell.”
The Western Front had become a “terrain of death.” It stretched nearly 500 miles
from the North Sea to the Swiss border. A British officer described it in a letter:PRIMARY SOURCE
Imagine a broad belt, ten miles or so in width, stretching from the Channel to the
German frontier near Basle, which is positively littered with the bodies of men and
scarified with their rude graves; in which farms, villages and cottages are shapeless
heaps of blackened masonry; in which fields, roads and trees are pitted and torn and
twisted by shells and disfigured by dead horses, cattle, sheep and goats, scattered in
every attitude of repulsive distortion and dismemberment.
VALENTINE FLEMING, quoted in The First World War847
Recognizing
Effects
Why was the
Battle of the Marne
so significant?
▼ Allied troops
crawl through a
trench along the
Western Front.